Clean up Your YouTube Feed With These Chrome Extensions
With each update, the desktop YouTube channel becomes more cluttered and unusable. So many videos now have clickbait titles and thumbnails, and we’ve seen so many shocked faces in those previews that it doesn’t even register as anything special anymore.
The recommended feed has even more clickbait, and short YouTube videos take up a lot of space on the home screen. What started out as a video viewing site quickly becomes an ad viewing site with some videos thrown in between. All of these design decisions were made with one goal in mind – to increase engagement at any cost. As a result, the YouTube desktop feed has become a real mess. Luckily, with the right Chrome extensions , you can make YouTube a lot more fun .
Block all ads
The number one complaint about YouTube videos is that the site constantly adds a lot of ads. If you’re fed up with this, you should install uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock . The former will block all ads on YouTube, especially if you fine-tune a few of its settings , and the latter will get rid of reading ads in the videos themselves. With these two extensions, you will never be bothered by YouTube ads again.
Hide algorithmic feeds on YouTube
Many people find YouTube recommendations to be useless. Over time, low-quality clickbait videos appear at an alarming rate. If YouTube’s recommendations don’t inspire you, you should install Unhook . The extension lets you block all kinds of recommended content on YouTube and even lets you hide comments, chat, YouTube short videos, and other items you don’t want to see. An underrated feature is its ability to hide unwanted YouTube search results, which does a great job of hiding recommended YouTube content.
(Another way to get around this is to turn off your browsing history, as YouTube will now show a blank homepage when you do this.)
Block spam channels and videos
BlockTube is a great extension for those who want to permanently hide certain videos and channels from their YouTube channels. You can click on the three dots next to any video and block it or the entire channel. The extension has several other useful features such as blocking certain words in comments, blocking all user comments, and showing or hiding videos based on the length of each video.
Get rid of clickbait
When you’re done with annoying titles and horrible thumbnails, you can install the Clickbait Remover . It will convert all video titles to lowercase, making them easier to read. The extension also replaces all video thumbnails with an actual frame from the video, which makes each thumbnail a lot more boring and encourages you to only click on videos that you might actually be interested in.
All-in-one extension to fix many YouTube annoyances.
YouTube enhancement is the swiss army knife of YouTube extensions. It blocks ads, removes recommended videos and other junk that you may not be interested in, and allows you to adjust a lot of settings, including automatic subtitles, video quality, and turning off autoplay. You can also quickly take screenshots of any YouTube video and enable a nifty volume normalization feature that reduces loud sounds in every video. If you spend a little time working with this extension’s settings, you’ll have a much better YouTube experience.